Data, Data, Data Everywhere

Data clouds and data floods are coming to our factories and businesses, thanks in part to the 5G infrastructure that's being built. This will bring a storm of change and a need to see patterns in that data in a whole new way.

A few years ago, we visited the new Jameson Distillery near Cork, Ireland. At one point, we asked the chief engineer, who was proudly showing us around its new building and machines that makes the whiskey, "How many sensors are in this factory?"

"So many I don't even know the number." That was more than five years ago. Today, some warehouses and factories have tens of thousands of robots and hundreds of thousands of sensors. You won't find anything useful in the data that's streaming off by using Microsoft Excel; there's just too much data to look through grids of numbers.

Los Angeles-based Suzie Borders has a better idea. Turn those millions of numbers streaming off of sensors into something that humans can better make sense of; for example, a simple virtual light on top of a factory machine. She showed us what she meant by putting us inside various devices, including a Magic Leap Spatial Computing headset and a variety of Virtual Reality headsets, where she walked us around datasets. Datasets that don't look like datasets at all! They are more like a new kind of virtual interface to data that you can grab and manipulate.

Photo Credit: Robert Scoble. Suzie Borders, CEO/Founder of BadVR, sports her Magic Leap while showing us around a virtualized factory floor. Oh, while we were having Tea in San Francisco.

After getting a demo of a bunch of different ways to look at different businesses and different data (the data streaming off of a sensor is quite different and needs to be seen by humans differently, than, say, the transaction data coming off of its bank accounts or point of sale machines), we came away believing that an entirely new way of working will soon arrive: one that will demand using new kinds of Spatial Computing devices.

Yes, people will resist wearing glasses, but those who dive in will find they get the raises and kudos for seeing new ways to make companies more effective and efficient, and we are betting a lot of those new jobs will be using Suzie's software.

The upgrade from 2D technologies to Spatial Computing's 3D technologies has its roots in the analog to digital transformation that happened prior. It is important to understand some of the impetus behind the prior change and what significance it has for our shift.